The Big Lie of Covid Herd Immunity

Why do some healthcare professionals still insist that herd immunity will work despite visual evidence to the contrary? 

A nicely explainer came out in Journal of Infectious Diseases March 2022: 

"As commonly understood, herd immunity thresholds are reached when a sufficient proportion of the population is vaccinated or has recovered from natural infection with a pathogen such that its community circulation is reduced below the level of significant public health threat. For example, this threshold has been met with polio and measles circulation in the United States. However, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is so different from polio and measles that classical herd immunity may not readily apply to it. Important differences include the phenotypic stability [tendency for the virus to remain the same] of polio and measles viruses, and their ability to elicit long-term protective immunity, compared to SARS-CoV-2."

With measles and polio, once you get it, you won't soon get it again because, as they figured out in 1876, they "elicited long-term protective immunity that reduced or prevented epidemics, until cumulative births resulted in sufficiently large cohorts of susceptible children to support new waves of transmission." So vaccinating everyone as infants was enough to stop the virus in its tracks! With Covid, as we really really know, for sure, you CAN get it again over and over, right away. Some people have had it six and seven times. Some people have had two infections within 30 days. 

The article further explains why herd immunity doesn't always work:

"Numerous variables greatly affected herd immunity thresholds, including differences among diseases and hosts, transmission modes (e.g. respiratory, enteric), duration and completeness of immunity, crowding and population movements. . . . With influenza, for example, the inadequacy or limited durability of immunity after vaccination or infection, and the continual antigenic drifting [genetic mutations] . . . has foiled attainment of strong herd immunity threshold effects. . . . For many common respiratory viruses such as influenza and RSV, the barriers to achieving herd immunity are even greater than with measles, polio, and smallpox. These barriers include asymptomatic transmission, incomplete or short-duration protective immunity, and viral immune escape [mutations that allow repeat infections]. . . . 

Like influenza, SARS-CoV-2 mutates continually into new variants that can escape immunity derived from infections and vaccines. It also can be transmitted asymptomatically and without pathognomonic signs [symptoms of illness], impeding public health control. SARS-CoV-2 appears not to substantially engage the systemic immune system, as do viruses such as smallpox, measles, and rubella, that consistently have a pronounced viremic phase [presence of virus in the blood for a long time]. Moreover, neither infection nor vaccination appears to induce prolonged protection against SARS-COV-2 in many or most people. Finally, the public health community has encountered substantial resistance to efforts to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2 by vaccination, mask wearing, and other interventions. . . .  Thus, Covid-19 is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future. . . . 

Optimal Covid-19 control will require both classic, nonpharmacologic public health approaches [masks, air filtration and ventilation] and vaccination of many more people globally with the SARS-CoV-2-specific vaccines . . . Living with Covid-19 is best considered not as reaching a numerical threshold of immunity, but as optimizing population protection without prohibitive restrictions on our daily lives." 

Yet some professionals in the field are stuck on the herd immunity bandwagon, advising people to stop any mitigations, and just wait long enough and it will all go away (despite, also, abysmal vaccination rates and varied access to vaccinations). One example, is Professor Irene Petersen, who researches the use of electronic health records for epidemiological data collection. She attempted to take Monbiot's recent article to task:

"If George Monbiot understood the basics of infectious disease epidemiology he would understand why it won't make a difference to keep children of school for a prolonged time. Likewise, he would understand that masking in hospitals DON'T work. It takes time to comes to terms with the fact that infectious diseases like Covid are primarily controlled by the level of immunity in the community. As humans we can try to delay transmission for a little while but people will still get infected if they are susceptible. Therefore, if George Monbiot was serious about protecting vulnerable people he should promote children in schools getting infection acquired immunity sooner rather than later during any outbreaks. Likewise, George Monbiot should be aware by now that there is NO such thing as 'covid safe environments'."

She also wrote this cryptic message the following day:

What does "if you are susceptible" mean?? Are there people who are not susceptible?? And my most active kid and I have are very likely still Covirgins despite continuing to do all the things we enjoy. If you wear a well-fitting mask everywhere you go, that risk drops considerably. And if everyone wears a mask, it drops every further!! We can't give up on the possibility of reducing the number and viral load of infections. This mindset of inevitability shrugs at any effort necessary and leaves the most vulnerable isolated in their homes. 

Then biologists Arijit Chakravarty clarified why "experts" like Irene keep making claims that completely counter the available and widely accepted science. It's well worth the read:

"At some point it dawned on me - pro-covid “experts” whose predictions constantly fail to come true aren’t platformed despite their poor track record, but because of it. We’re approaching the fourth year of a pandemic where the public health strategy is to do pretty much nothing and wait for “thin out the herd” immunity. The notion is that if you wait long enough, the virus will no longer be a threat. Failing that, maybe the public can be made to accept a reduced lifespan and worse personal health outcomes as being “inevitable.” So yeah, we’re a couple of years into this plan, and the facts show that it’s all going pretty poorly. The annual death toll from covid makes it - still - a leading cause of death; long covid affects hundreds of millions worldwide, and the virus is evolving, likely faster than ever before. It’s important to note that the health harms of covid are legion and not up for any sort of serious debate in the scientific community. There are literally thousands of papers on it, approaching the questions at various different scales - from biochemistry to clinical studies. Post-covid health outcomes can be serious at some very nonzero frequency; their risk doesn’t go down appreciably with reinfections, and people will get infected 1-2 times per year if they take no precautions. It’s not sustainable, and there are already numerous clues that this won’t work: Labor shortages, falling test scores, ‘mysterious’ illnesses spreading through the population, falling life expectancies. These are precisely the consequences you’d expect from the untrammeled spread of a highly contagious virus with acute, delayed-onset and long-term harms.

Governments worldwide have gone the Big Tobacco route on covid. The health harms from smoking were well known for decades before it was acknowledged as a public health concern. Big Tobacco’s strategy was to promote a loose-knit group of “contrarian” scientists and doctors. These “experts” were paid in cash in some cases, in clout in other cases, and they received media attention because they allowed the “both sides” framing of the issue. It’s important to note that there was a mountain of damning data and only a handful of contrarian “experts.” These “Merchants of Doubt” played an important role in delaying government action on tobacco, because they created the illusion of scientific debate. It’s a well documented playbook, and it was used successfully by Big Oil as well for climate. The situation is the same for covid now as it was for tobacco then. There is a flood of information pouring out literally every week about how much harm the “unlimited covid” strategy is doing to individuals, public health and the economy. This is where the always-wrong “expert opinion” comes in. There are people out there willing to say anything (for money/clout); it’s these people that the media specifically seeks out. They almost always take positions that are unsupported by the data. This is not a bug - it’s a feature. 

Media coverage of “bad news” follows one of two templates. If it’s about covid specifically: “There’s this report about this thing that happens because of covid. Here are four experts who will explain why you shouldn’t worry about that.” If it’s bad news with plausible deniability about covid being the cause: “There’s this thing that happened. So mysterious. Sudden changes like this are always the result of many factors. It’s complicated. Here are four experts who are just as baffled about it as you are.” The important thing to note is that all this happens organically. The first “experts” who go out on a limb are the ones inventing the narrative. That narrative is then spread by the media, and amplified and expanded by the “experts” who follow. The people who are willing to play this game are not part of a giant conspiracy. They’re just rats in a Skinner Box: they know that if they push the lever clearly labeled “bullshit” they will be rewarded for it. Sometimes, the rewards are explicit, for example with Kallmemeg and Chise, they both received actual awards for their “scicomms” efforts around vaccines. Other “experts” have been rewarded with faculty appointments. Other times it’s implicit - for example, one of the most highly funded infectious diseases researchers in the NIH can’t seem to stop being wrong about covid, and the halls of the most highly funded ID department in the country are crawling with covid-denying “experts.” 

While there are cases of dark money-funded “expertise,” it’s important to note that there’s a whole diverse ecosystem of creepie-crawlies hiding under the rock of covid denialism. The “Merchants of Doubt” strategy is an old one. Propaganda strengthens itself through repetition, and if you can find a network of people willing to repeat a certain set of talking points, you can organically shape public opinion, even in the face of a rising tide of data. The strategy itself owes a debt to Goebbels [possibly misattributed]: 

'If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the . . . consequences of the lie.'

Viewed in this light then, the “always wrong” experts are not mistaken, they are simply providing an alternate reality. They spin lies from whole cloth (in some cases pushed through peer review) that are then used to frame the counterprogramming to reality."

We saw through Big Tobacco's bullshit - most of us very early on as we watched loved ones die of lung cancer. Big Oil has been harder because it's less immediately visible to us. But it's amazing how many people will say, in the same sentence, that they're so glad Covid's over, since their children have been sick over and over this year. So many have bought the lie that it's damaging the networks of society with labour shortages. And the worst part of it is the number who make no effort to protect their kids from ongoing illness because they've been convinced that it's the new normal that we have to accept. 

We don't have to accept it. 

Help to save the brains and bodies of children, pets, friends, and loved-ones by simply wearing an N95.